Review: Last Train poetry books

From the October 2018 edition of Australian Model Railway Magazine.

The October 2018 edition of Australian Model Railway Magazine featured a review on two very obscure, and quite possibly never-seen-before, books on railway bush poetry. If you're wondering who is responsible for trying to mash-up some traditional Aussie bush poetry with photographs of surviving relics from our railway past, then I'm going to own up. It was me.

  

The books in question are both self-produced, and I say that with a sense of pride as they feature my own photography, my own original poetry and were laid-out, edited, proofed, blocked and had the covers designed by me. The only thing I haven't done is handle my own distribution. I've set that up to be fully automated through Blurb.com. As for the lack of posts on this blog over the past month, that can be attributed to my working on the next instalment, the cover of which you can see above.

The review by AMRM was much appreciated. Overseeing a project such as this is time-consuming to say the least, and the next book to follow in the series is the result of my adventuring through the Southwest of Western Australia over the summer of 2017/2018. The costs alone in going out of my way to photograph abandoned railway stations and bridges on the other side of the country will ensure that the next Last Train book will never return a profit, given that a modest sales expectation for any kind of self-published poetry book would be no more than 100 copies. For a niche project such as this, no publisher was ever going to touch it. That makes getting a review on the book so important. So what were some of the kind words that editor James McInerney had to say?

"Some of the photos are visually quite stunning, capturing the atmosphere of the scenes with great artistic flair."

"...I enjoyed reading the poems and they certainly convey a very effective 'word picture' to go with the images." 

Although I've often reviewed other company's products and models on my blog, I could never bring myself to review my own work. So kudos to the kind words from James Mc.

While this may all seem like a bit of self-serving hoopla over something that anyone could do if they really wanted to, I've looked at the past few years of my writing and blogging about trains and model railways, in much the same way as an Actor or Actress taking time away from acting to work on another project. Eric Bana stepped away to film a documentary about his muscle car, and followed it up with some part-time rally driving. Come mid next year, I'll have a small body of railway books to look back on fondly in old age while sitting on my couch and sipping cups of tea. As for my next move? I feel I owe it to myself to finally have another crack at writing that blockbuster novel I've always dreamed of, (however long that takes). Hopefully in the years to come, these self-published railway books will all become an interesting 'before they were famous' story!

With October already in full swing, this weekend I'll be attending the 2018 Modelling the Railways of Queensland Convention. Following that, I'll be applying the new photo backdrop to Philden, getting some more work done on the Travel Centre for the beach extension and hopefully, (yes, hopefully) seeing the post man arrive with the 442 Class loco I'm waiting on. I suppose it's nice to always have something that you're waiting on. So from that point of view, I've added a 422 Class loco in Northern Rivers Railroad livery to the waiting list, (even though I did say I was done with pre-orders and adding anything more to my NSW layout). It seems there's always room for one more model train isn't there? Oh, and did I say I was about to start building a new layout? Thought so. But as usual, there never seems to be enough time. So I'll let that be a story for another day.

Stay tuned to this and my author blog at phillipoverton.blogspot.com as I'll have a big announcement to make regarding my books in May 2019.

My books can be purchased directly online through the following outlets

 

See also; Retiring a good series